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Nzara fire, 5 January 2020 Nzara

Out · last detection 16 Jan 2020, 23:11 UTC

The fire started on 5 January 2020 in Nzara, South Sudan, and satellites saw it burning for 11 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 7,179 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 193th largest in Western Equatoria since 2016 (of 359 with a page). Number 101 in South Sudan in 2020, of 190.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Nzara · 2025Nzara · 2024Yambio · 2026Nzara · 2019

Burnt area
7,179ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
11days
5 Jan 2020 – 15 Jan 2020
Municipalities hit
1
counties
Started on
5 Jan
2020
Heat detections
188
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
49
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
142MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Jan15 Jan
16 Jan 2020

How it evolved, day by day

5 Jan 2020 · 455 MW · 43 6 Jan 2020 · 9 MW · 5 8 Jan 2020 · 57 MW · 10 9 Jan 2020 · 82 MW · 20 10 Jan 2020 · 238 MW · 39 11 Jan 2020 · 403 MW · 38 12 Jan 2020 · 181 MW · 14 13 Jan 2020 · 112 MW · 10 14 Jan 2020 · 2 MW · 1 15 Jan 2020 · 24 MW · 6 16 Jan 2020 · 5 MW · 2
5 Jan 8 Jan 10 Jan 12 Jan 14 Jan 16 Jan

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

38°high
39km/h · peak gust
9%lowest humidity

It had gone 39 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 4.5% of the area of London (72 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Nzara where it started
    7,236 ha
    1.1 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
5 Jan 33.8 °C 17 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
6 Jan 35.0 °C 18 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
7 Jan 35.9 °C 18 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
8 Jan 36.6 °C 15 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
9 Jan 35.5 °C 13 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
10 Jan 34.9 °C 13 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
11 Jan 34.0 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
12 Jan 32.8 °C 9 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
13 Jan 34.3 °C 10 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
14 Jan 36.8 °C 12 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
15 Jan 38.0 °C 14 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
16 Jan after 38.7 °C 18 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
17 Jan after 39.1 °C 17 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
18 Jan after 37.0 °C 14 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
19 Jan after 34.8 °C 13 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
20 Jan after 34.3 °C 14 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
21 Jan after 34.3 °C 15 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
22 Jan after 33.8 °C 11 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
23 Jan after 33.1 °C 11 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
24 Jan after 33.4 °C 11 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
25 Jan after 33.8 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 29 Dec 2019
After · 22 Jan 2020

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

Detections table · 0Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in South Sudan ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Nzara fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 January 2020 and 15 January 2020: 11 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 7,179 hectares (71.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Nzara (7,236 ha, 1.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.0 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 39 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of South Sudan (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 20 January 2020 → 15 January 2020.
  2. Start date: 31 December 2019 → 5 January 2020.
  3. Last day with fire: 15 January 2020 → 20 January 2020.
  4. Start date: 5 January 2020 → 31 December 2019.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

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How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2020, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.